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About gynocentrism

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Gynocentrism (n.) refers to a dominant focus on women’s needs and wants relative to men’s needs and wants. This can happen in the context of cultural conventions, social institutions, political policies, and in gendered relationships.1

See here for more dictionary definitions of gynocentrism

Introduction

Cultural gynocentrism emerged in Medieval Europe during a time of profound cross-cultural exchange and shifting gender customs. From the 11th century onward, European society absorbed influences ranging from Arabic love poetry to aristocratic courtship trends, alongside the rise of the Marian cult. This climate was further shaped by figures such as Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter Marie who transformed the ideal of chivalry into a code of male service to women —a tradition now known as courtly love.

Courtly love was popularized through the work of troubadours, minstrels, playwrights, and by commissioned romance writers whose stories laid down a model of romantic fiction that remains the most commercially successful genre of literature to this day. That confluence of factors generated the conventions that continue to drive gynocentric practices to the present.

Gynocentrism as a cultural phenomenon

The primary elements of gynocentric culture, as we experience it today, are derived from practices originating in medieval society such as feudalism, chivalry and courtly love. These traditions continue to shape contemporary society in subtle but enduring ways. In this context, various scholars and writers have described gynocentric patterns as a form of “sexual feudalism.”

For example, in 1600, the Italian writer Lucrezia Marinella observed that women of lower social classes were often treated as superiors, while men served them like knightly retainers and beasts of burden. Similarly, Modesta Pozzo, writing in 1590, remarked:

“Don’t we see that men’s rightful task is to go out to work and wear themselves out trying to accumulate wealth, as though they were our factors or stewards, so that we can remain at home like the lady of the house directing their work and enjoying the profit of their labors? That, if you like, is the reason why men are naturally stronger and more robust than us — they need to be, so they can put up with the hard labor they must endure in our service.”2

The golden casket at the head of this page depicting scenes of servile behaviour toward women were typical of courtly love culture of the Middle Ages. Such objects were given to women as gifts by men seeking to impress. Note the woman standing with hands on hips in a position of authority, and the man being led around by a neck halter, his hands clasped in a position of subservience.

It’s clear that much of what we today call gynocentrism was invented in this early period, where the feudal template was employed as the basis for a new model for love in which men would play the role of a vassal to women who assumed the role of an idealized Lord.

C.S. Lewis, in the middle of the 20th Century, referred to this historical revolution as “the feudalisation of love,” and stated that it has left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life untouched. “Compared with this revolution,” states Lewis, “the Renaissance is a mere ripple on the surface of literature.”3 Lewis further states;

“Everyone has heard of courtly love, and everyone knows it appeared quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century at Languedoc. The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, Adultery and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. Here is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady’s ‘man’. He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord’. The whole attitude has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’. This solemn amatory ritual is felt to be part and parcel of the courtly life.” 4

With the advent of (initially courtly) women being elevated to the position of ‘Lord’ in intimate relationships, and with this general sentiment diffusing to the masses and across much of the world today, we are justified in talking of a gynocentric cultural complex that affects, among other things, relationships between men and women. Further, unless evidence of widespread gynocentric culture can be found prior to the Middle Ages, then  gynocentrism is approximately 1000 years old. In order to determine if this thesis is valid we need to look further at what we mean by “gynocentrism”.

The term gynocentrism has been in circulation since the 1800’s, with the general definition being “focused on women; concerned with only women.”5 From this definition we see that gynocentrism could refer to any female-centered practice, or to a single gynocentric act carried out by one individual. There is nothing inherently wrong with a gynocentric act (eg. celebrating Mother’s Day) , or for that matter an androcentric act (celebrating Father’s Day). However when a given act becomes instituted in the culture to the exclusion of other acts we are then dealing with a hegemonic custom — i.e. such is the relationship custom of elevating women to the position of men’s social, moral or spiritual superiors.

Author of Gynocentrism Theory Adam Kostakis has attempted to expand the definition of gynocentrism to refer to “male sacrifice for the benefit of women” and “the deference of men to women,” and he concludes; “Gynocentrism, whether it went by the name honor, nobility, chivalry, or feminism, its essence has gone unchanged. It remains a peculiarly male duty to help the women onto the lifeboats, while the men themselves face a certain and icy death.”6

While we can agree with Kostakis’ descriptions of assumed male duty, the phrase gynocentric culture more accurately carries his intention than gynocentrism alone. Thus when used alone in the context of this website gynocentrism refers to part or all of gynocentric culture, which is defined here as any culture instituting rules for gender relationships that benefit females at the expense of males across a broad range of measures.

At the base of gynocentric culture lies the practice of enforced male sacrifice for the benefit of women. If we accept this definition we must look back and ask whether male sacrifices throughout history were always made for the sake women, or alternatively for the sake of some other primary goal? For instance, when men went to die in vast numbers in wars, was it for women, or was it rather for Man, King, God and Country? If the latter we cannot then claim that this was a result of some intentional gynocentric culture, at least not in the way I have defined it here. If the sacrifice isn’t intended directly for the benefit women, even if women were occasional beneficiaries of male sacrifice, then we are not dealing with gynocentric culture.

Male utility and disposability strictly “for the benefit of women” comes in strongly only after the advent of the 12th century gender revolution in Europe – a revolution that delivered us terms like gallantry, chivalry, chivalric love, courtesy, damsels, romance and so on. From that period onward gynocentric practices grew exponentially, culminating in the demands of today’s feminist movement. In sum, gynocentrism (ie. gynocentric culture) was a patchy phenomenon at best before the middle ages, after which it became ubiquitous.

With this in mind it makes little sense to talk of gynocentric culture starting with the industrial revolution a mere 200 years ago (or 100 or even 30 yrs ago), or of it being two million years old as some would argue. We are not only fighting two million years of genetic programming; our culturally constructed problem of gender inequity is much simpler to pinpoint and to potentially reverse. All we need do is look at the circumstances under which gynocentric culture first began to flourish and attempt to reverse those circumstances. Specifically, that means rejecting the illusions of romantic love (feudalised love), along with the practices of misandry, male shaming and servitude that ultimately support it.

La Querelle des Femmes, and advocacy for women

The Querelle des Femmes translates as the “quarrel about women” and amounts to what we might today call a gender-war. The querelle had its beginning in twelfth century Europe and finds its culmination in the feminist-driven ideology of today (though some authors claim, unconvincingly, that the querelle came to an end in the 1700s).

The basic theme of the centuries-long quarrel revolved, and continues to revolve, around advocacy for the rights, power and status of women, and thus Querelle des Femmes serves as the originating title for gynocentric discourse.

To place the above events into a coherent timeline, chivalric servitude toward women was elaborated and given patronage first under the reign of Eleanor of Aquitaine (1137-1152) and instituted culturally throughout Europe over the subsequent 200 year period. After becoming thus entrenched on European soil there arose the Querelle des Femmes which refers to the advocacy culture that arose for protecting, perpetuating and increasing female power in relation to men that continues, in an unbroken tradition, in the efforts of contemporary feminism.7

Writings from the Middle Ages forward are full of testaments about men attempting to adapt to the feudalisation of love and the serving of women, along with the emotional agony, shame and sometimes physical violence they suffered in the process. Gynocentric chivalry and the associated querelle have not received much elaboration in men’s studies courses to-date, but with the emergence of new manuscripts and quality English translations it may be profitable to begin blazing this trail.8

References

1. Wright, P., What’s in a suffix? taking a closer look at the word gyno–centrism
2. Modesta Pozzo, The Worth of Women: their Nobility and Superiority to Men
3. C.S. Lewis, Friendship, chapter in The Four Loves, HarperCollins, 1960
4. C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, Oxford University Press, 1936
5. Dictionary.com – Gynocentric
6. Adam Kostakis, Gynocentrism Theory – (Published online, 2011). Although Kostakis assumes gynocentrism has been around throughout recorded history, he singles out the Middle Ages for comment: “There is an enormous amount of continuity between the chivalric class code which arose in the Middle Ages and modern feminism… One could say that they are the same entity, which now exists in a more mature form – certainly, we are not dealing with two separate creatures.”
7. Joan Kelly, Early Feminist Theory and the Querelle des Femmes (1982), reprinted in Women, History and Theory, UCP (1984)
8. The New Male Studies Journal has published thoughtful articles touching on the history and influence of chivalry in the lives of males.

The Only Non-Gynocentric Approach in the Manosphere

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Introduction

Within the manosphere, every major school of thought—traditional MRAs, Red Pill and PUA communities, MGTOW, Black Pill and incel circles, and tradcon voices—treats gynocentrism as an evolutionary given. They differ in tactics, yet they share the premise that women (and to varying extents men) are hardwired for maintaining female-centered narcissism and solipsism, making extreme prioritization of women a permanent feature of human nature that can only be managed, navigated, withdrawn from, or fatalistically accepted.

Against this near-consensus stands Men’s Human Rights Advocacy (MHRA), or the Men’s Human Rights Movement (MHRM). Coined in 2013, MHRA is defined by the explicit rejection of that premise. It holds that while biological tendencies absolutely exist, the modern syndrome of gynocentrism is not a compulsory part of evolved female nature. It is a cultivated product of developmental failure and cultural indoctrination—historically amplified, especially from medieval courtly traditions onward—and therefore neither inevitable nor something women “cannot help.”

Only the MHRA label is founded on this non-gynocentric axiom. A small minority of individuals elsewhere in the manosphere may privately share the same view, but their groups as such do not.

Origins and definition of MHRA/MHRM

The terms Men’s Human Rights Advocacy (MHRA) and Men’s Human Rights Movement (MHRM) were introduced in January 2013 at A Voice for Men, with Paul Elam adopting the phrase in the article “Entering a New ERA,” while Peter Wright’s contemporaneous piece “Welcome to the Second Wave” framed the shift as a deliberate second wave of men’s advocacy.

Earlier (“first-wave”) men’s rights efforts frequently sought to defend men’s ability to fulfill traditional roles—provider, protector, or chivalric servant—while still operating inside longstanding cultural assumptions of male sacrifice and female prioritization. The 2013 coinage marked a clean break from that orientation, along with false biological theories used to underpin it. MHRA is defined by the explicit premise that men’s interests are human rights in their own right, not accommodations negotiated inside a system presumed to be biologically or evolutionarily woman-centered. It rejects the claim that humans must function within a bio-gynocentric order in which female centrality, male disposability, or chivalric service form the baseline reality.

Adding the word “human” was also intentional: it counters the common caricature of men’s advocacy as a bid for regressive rights over women and children, and it anchors the project in universal human-rights language rather than in gender-role traditionalism.

From the outset, the distinction was conceptual rather than merely tactical—MHRA is the only manosphere label coined and defined as non-gynocentric.

The hardwired-gynocentrism axiom across the manosphere

Across the rest of the manosphere, groups differ in tactics and tone, yet they share a common premise: gynocentrism—reducible to female-centered narcissism and solipsism as the governing forces of human relationships—is largely hardwired into female nature and is therefore a permanent feature of our species. Men, on this view, are compelled by evolutionary forces and reflexes either to play along with it or to wrestle with it—but they can never be without it. They disagree on how best to respond to it today, but they nevertheless accept it as evolutionary bedrock.

Traditional MRAs focus on concrete legal and institutional disadvantages—family courts, custody bias, false accusations, education gaps, suicide, male victims of domestic violence. Some refer to this as “Gamma bias,” and a substantial majority of these advocates nevertheless treat “natural gynocentrism” as given: women are evolutionarily more central, so the practical goal is to secure a less punitive deal for men inside a system that will remain woman-prioritizing. Reform is sought; the premise of female centrality is not abandoned.

Red Pill and PUA communities center on decoding female psychology, hypergamy, and dual mating strategies, then develop techniques of “game” to approach these supposedly timeless, static behaviors. Sexual market value, status, and methods for attracting or managing women are the metrics of success. The entire enterprise assumes female choice and gatekeeping are hardwired realities that men must adapt to, rather than contingent cultural patterns that could be otherwise. Like the armies of blue-pill men indoctrinated into the gynocentric script, those who play along with the PUA/game framework often invite confirmation bias by eliciting, through their own cues, the very behaviors they then cite as evidence of hardwired female nature.

MGTOW is grounded in the overriding principle of male self-determination, yet frequently set in explicit contradistinction and reaction to hardwired human gynocentrism. It advocates opting out of the expected social contract with women—refusing marriage, cohabitation, and often committed relationships—because of the legal, financial, and social risks created by a biologically driven gynocentric order. Many pursue more novel, lower-burden interactions that depart from the usual gynocentric script, yet the worldview that justifies these choices still commonly treats hypergamy, male sycophancy, and female prioritization as fixed evolutionary imperatives. Withdrawal or selective engagement remains rational either way—regardless of whether gynocentric traits are treated as permanent evolutionary facts or as a widespread cultural phenomenon of the current era. A mistaken premise can still produce a fitting response to the conditions actually in play.

Black Pill and incel communities, with few exceptions, tend push the same premise to its fatalistic extreme: female hypergamy and looks-based selection are genetically locked, male outcomes are largely predetermined, and little can be altered. Women remain the absolute arbiters of male value; the entire orientation is organized around that inescapable fact.

Tradcon and traditionalist strands within or adjacent to the manosphere often seek a return to complementary gender roles, male provision and protection, and chivalric norms. These are classic expressions of gynocentrism merely preferred in their older form over the feminist variant. Female elevation and male sacrifice are treated as God-given or evolutionarily proper—natural and desirable rather than culturally crafted and amplified.

In each case the organizing principle remains the same: gynocentrism is hardwired female nature, so strategy consists of navigating, reforming, withdrawing from, or resigning oneself to it as a permanent human condition.

Resistance still premised on permanence

Opposition to gynocentrism within the manosphere does not equal non-gynocentrism. The tactics differ—legal and institutional reform among traditional MRAs, selective withdrawal or novel lower-burden arrangements among MGTOW, technique-based navigation among Red Pill and PUA communities, fatalistic resignation among Black Pill and incel circles, or restoration of older chivalric forms among tradcons—yet each remains an attempt to manage, escape, or reconfigure a system still treated as biologically compulsory.

What unites these responses is the shared premise that gynocentrism is hardwired into female nature and therefore permanent. Resistance, on this view, means negotiating a better position inside it, minimizing exposure to it, or resigning oneself to its inevitability. It does not mean rejecting the claim that female-centered narcissism and solipsism are evolutionary givens. Even the most thorough opting-out remains rationalized by the belief that those traits cannot be escaped at the level of human nature itself.

Only by abandoning that premise does resistance become non-gynocentric. The MHRA position is defined by precisely that abandonment.

A common supporting move is the appeal to “praxeology”—the manosphere’s appropriated term for describing what is observably happening in the present moment. Current patterns of female-centered behavior are taken as sufficient evidence that gynocentrism may be the permanent human condition, while the fact that behavior changes from year to year, and even minute to minute, is set aside. The move closes off any serious consideration of non-gynocentric human interaction throughout the past, in the immediate present, or of possible non-gynocentric arrangements into the future, thereby protecting the confirmation bias that treats today’s praxeological samplings as proof of hardwired gynocentric nature.

Praxeology in this sense is only an observation of momentary, cross-cultural praxis. Process philosophers remind us that such a snapshot is a mirage: behavior is an ongoing movement of process that changes from second to second. Put a different way, praxis is shaped and driven by the passing ideology and memetics of the moment. What is being described, therefore, is largely contemporary ideology rather than a reliable, non-changing essence toward which a man can reliably gear his life. The assumption that such a snapshot reveals a static human nature denies that human behavior and culture are always in process—never fixed essences—capable of historical variation and future change.

The minority exceptions and the MHRA axiom

Within every major manosphere group a small minority of individuals—likely under five percent—already reject the claim that gynocentrism is hardwired female nature. They treat the modern syndrome of female-centered narcissism and solipsism as a product of developmental failure and cultural indoctrination rather than an evolutionary given. Some of these men, including a small strand inside the realms of MGTOW, therefore sit compatibly inside the same conceptual frame that defines MHRA.

Yet the existence of individual exceptions does not alter the character of the groups themselves. Traditional MRAs, Red Pill and PUA communities, MGTOW as a whole, Black Pill circles, and tradcon strands continue to operate on the shared premise that gynocentrism is permanent female nature. Their dominant discourses, strategies, and self-understandings remain organized around that premise.

Only the MHRA/MHRM label was coined and defined, from its 2013 origin onward, as explicitly and wholly premised on the opposite axiom: that gynocentrism is not women’s hardwired nature. Those who adopt the MHRA designation do so on that basis. The distinction is therefore not that no one elsewhere has reached the same conclusion, but that only MHRA is structured, named, and maintained as a perspective in which the rejection of bio-gynocentrism is foundational rather than incidental.

MGTOW as compatible demonstration of human-rights

MGTOW’s decision to opt out of the modern gynocentric social contract is an individualistic, human-rights gesture by men: an assertion of self-determination against other-determination. From the 2013 articulation of MHRA onward, this form of male self-determination has been treated as compatible with the intent of men’s human rights advocacy, not as a rival stance opposed to it.

Some men who identify as MHRA pursue cultural or institutional pushback against specific expressions of gynocentrism; others, just like MGTOW, treat personal non-participation as the primary response. Regardless of the response chosen, the continuous premise is a refusal to treat gynocentrism as an incontrovertible bio-social system that women cannot help enact, nor men support.

MGTOW self-determination therefore sits inside the same frame as an available expression of a human-rights claim. This is true in reference to the minority who reject the hardwired premise, but also as a practical option for those who still hold it. Withdrawal or selective, lower-burden engagement remains compatible with the MHRA axiom precisely because the axiom does not require men to remain inside a system organized around female centrality, nor does it insist on reforming the political system as a motive that was and remains standard for older MRAs—which is now considered only one way among many of tackling men’s human rights.

Gynocentrism as cultivated syndrome

Gynocentrism is a cultivated syndrome comprised of subclinical narcissism and solipsism, which are produced by developmental failures and cultural indoctrination. Isolated biological tendencies toward the protection and provisioning of family members—women, children, or others—are misread as gynocentric priorities when it is women who are the recipients, but these acts are more accurately classed as expressions of storge, or family love, in which care follows the shifting needs of family members rather than a fixed women-first hierarchy. What is rejected are the totalizing claims that humans are a gynocentric species, that male-female relationships are biologically designed to be woman-centered, or that the extreme modern form of gynocentrism is simply hardwired female nature.

The modern syndrome is treated instead as a culturally supersized trope. It draws on historical patterns—especially those that took shape in medieval courtly traditions and were later intensified through romantic and chivalric tropes, modern media, and social contracts—and on developmental exemptions that spare women from fully internalizing the reality principle. Solipsism, on this account, is more plausibly a failure of childhood psychological development peculiar to the modern era than an evolved inevitability that men must accommodate via constant self-improvement and giving.

The result is a gendered, subclinical expression of narcissistic traits within heterosexual and cultural contexts, not a compulsory species-level hardwiring. Recognition of this modern phenomenon, and of the practical wisdom of avoiding its excesses, does not require the explanatory story that “women cannot help it because it is their deep evolutionary nature.”

Conclusion

MHRA is the only perspective in the manosphere explicitly founded on the rejection of gynocentrism as hardwired female nature. Other groups may resist its effects through reform, withdrawal, technique, or fatalism, yet they do so while treating it as a permanent evolutionary given. Scattered individuals elsewhere may reach the same non-gynocentric conclusion, but only MHRA is coined and defined as wholly premised on that axiom. The distinction is conceptual: men’s human rights pursued without accepting female centrality as the inescapable baseline.

From Greek gynaikokratia to gynocentrism: a two-thousand-year vocabulary of centering women

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Gynaikokratia, gynarchy, gynecocracy, gynaecocracy, gynocracy, gyneolatry, and gynocentrism — what do all these words have in common?

The vocabulary that places women first in authority and in social priority is much older than the word gynocentrism. Ancient Greek gynaikokratia, already used by Aristotle and later classical writers, names the dominance of women over men. English and French took up that idea in a cluster of near-synonyms: gynarchy, also spelled gunarchy and gunarchie, from the late sixteenth century; gyneocracy and gynaecocracy, also written gynæcocracy, from the 1610s; gynecocracy from about 1612; gynocracy from 1728; and French ginæcocratie (more usually gynécocratie).

Gynocentrism itself is recorded only from 1897. Across that span the words differ in range, but they share one evaluation: women are the center, and men are arranged in relation to them.

Rulership is not a rival idea to centering. It is a strong form of it. To vest government, magistracy, or household authority in women is to make them the reference point around which others are ordered. Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) heads a section “The gunarchie of queene Cordeilla.” Roger Coke in 1660 draws the domestic conclusion: “in gynarchy the wife is not subject, but superior to her husband.” In each case the woman, as queen or as wife, is the point from which subjection and superiority are measured. That is centering by means of supremacy.

Gynocentrism, formed in English from gyno– and –centrism, narrows the same sentiment to dominant or exclusive focus on women. Its earliest known use, in The Open Court in 1897, has Continental observers describing Americans as suffering from gynocentrism rather than anthropocentrism. Later writers applied it to social life arranged for the convenience and delight of women, treating it as a broad cultural force.

It need not mean a literal queen or a government run by women. A culture can still prioritize women in manners, law, feeling, or the home without institutional rule by women. The older words and gynocentrism still point the same way—toward various forms of elevation. Where women hold the higher place, whether in the state or in the house, one set of words emphasizes institutional supremacy and the other refers to cultural and relational centering. Both are looking at different aspects of the very same phenomenon.

The older terms therefore already contained the basic sentiment of gynocentrism as now understood—women primary, men secondary or subordinate—while applying it across a broader field. Gynaikokratia, gynarchy, gunarchy, gunarchie, gynæcocracy, ginæcocratie, gynecocracy, and gynocracy cover sovereignty, political supremacy, evolutionary claims about female rule, and domestic hierarchy. Gynocentrism keeps the centering and drops the requirement of formal government. The continuity is semantic: the later word names, as focus, what the earlier words enacted as rule.

Lastly, gyniolatry (with the variant spellings gyneolatry, gynaecolatry, and gynerolatry), attested from 1876 and meaning the worship or excessive adoration of women, meets the same line from the side of reverence. Often linked in period usage to chivalry, it centers women as the object of devotion rather than as rulers, and so intersects both the supremacy named by gynarchy and gynecocracy and the focus later called gynocentrism.

Taken together, the list is one vocabulary under several names. Gynaikokratia, gynarchy, gunarchy, gunarchie, gyneocracy, gynaecocracy, gynæcocracy, ginæcocratie, gynécocratie, gynecocracy, and gynocracy say it as rule. Gyniolatry, gyneolatry, gynaecolatry, and gynerolatry say it as worship. Gynocentrism says it as focus. The spelling changes, and so does the field each word covers, but the evaluation does not: women are held higher, men are arranged in relation to them. That is what all these words have in common.

The Narcissistic Life-Cycle of Women in Contemporary Gynocentric Culture

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The following argument is simple. A girl is not required to give up as much of her primary narcissism as a boy is on his developmental journey. Romantic chivalry helps provoke that exemption in the family, then takes it over as a broader social contract. By adulthood the exemption is no longer only a private residue. It is a social situation: elevation on one side, tribute on the other.

Three different accounts are at play—Freud’s infantile narcissism, Millon’s grandiose narcissism, and Kohut’s vulnerable narcissism—each remaining a distinct construct. In the gynocentric life-cycle they tend to overlap, forming a state which can be more or less exaggerated by situation: more likely to be switched on in heterosexual exchange, where the woman is positioned as the one to be served and the man as the one who underwrites her center. That pairing is the old chivalric assignment in modern dress: she the suzerain, he the vassal; she the elevation, he the service.

1. The family compact

Primary narcissism is the infant’s position: self as first object, wish as law, the other not yet a separate center. The baby does not begin with a shared world. Hunger, comfort, and attention arrive as if the world were an organ of the self. Other people are not yet other; they are extensions.

That position does not fade by itself. It is broken by clashes. Freud called the accumulating force of those clashes the reality principle: the breast is not the self, the parent has another will, time does not obey the wish, the body is limited, other children exist, “no” is a fact rather than an insult. Delay, refusal, rival needs, and consequences keep teaching the same lesson—the world is not an organ of the baby.

The superego is the later, inner form of that lesson. What began as an external limit (a parent’s prohibition, a demand to wait, to share, to answer for harm) is internalized as an authority that says: you are not the law; you owe; your feeling is not a warrant. Maturity, in this account, is not niceness. It is the capacity to let the pleasure-self be overruled by a shared world and by an internalized demand for responsibility.

Families often run those clashes on a double standard. Twenge and Campbell (2009) write: “A remarkable percentage of clothing for baby girls has ‘Princess’ or ‘Little Princess’ written on it, which is wishful thinking unless you are the long-lost heir to a throne. And if your daughter is a princess, does this mean that you are the queen or king? No—it means you are the loyal subject, and you must do what the princess says.” 1

Daughters are often praised, buffered, and colluded with in the name of self-esteem. Sons are interrupted earlier: share, wait, girls-first, do not cry, be useful, your feeling is not the law. The compact is tacit. She need not relinquish as much of the infantile position.2 Typically, he must. The cost for her is a more solipsistic disposition: she is somewhat spared the demand that maturity means the world does not arrange itself around her. Reality still exists; it is simply applied with more cushion and more applause. The cost for him is emptying. That emptying later looks like duty, and later still like chivalry.

This is not a claim that no girl meets reality or that no boy is spoiled. It is a claim about uneven pressure at the first site where omnipotence is supposed to be given up.

2. The cultural compact

What the family starts, the culture finishes. Romantic chivalry is the long background tradition that says the woman’s position is to be elevated and the man’s is to serve that elevation.3 Courtesy is the polite surface of this arrangement. The compact is not issued equally.

For him, the usual path is ordinary recognition for ordinary compliance. For her, it is retained elevation—a public arrangement that exempts her from ordinary limits rather than asking her to accept them. She is not only seen: she is to be seen as if the world still turned toward her. He is assigned the tributary role of underwriting that appearance.

Robert Millman’s acquired situational narcissism4 names the same process. Narcissism need not be only a childhood scar. It can be fed by a situation in which everyone around a person treats them as extraordinary. Millman was talking about fame. The gynocentric claim is that a person’s sex, under chivalric convention, can work like a milder, lifelong fame: special status ascribed for being the woman in the pair, with etiquette, media, and moral language as the entourage that feeds it. Whether the seed was already there or not, the heterosexual situation amplifies it. A culture reproduces what it pays for.

3. Three narcissisms, in a single amalgam

The following three constructs answer different questions and should not be mashed into one diagnosis. In the life-cycle this article describes, they can be seen operating together.

  • Infantile / primary (Freud):  the other was never fully constituted; omnipotence was never fully given up—inaccessibility, self-sufficiency, the unmarked center.
  • Grandiose (Millon): entitlement and superiority learned from overvaluation. Kernberg describes an alternative route—a defensive inflation against early hatred and envy.
  • Vulnerable (Kohut): an exhibitionistic self that still needs a ‘reflecting other’ to stay intact. When that other fails, the result is injury, collapse, rage, or emptiness. Kohut treats this as continuous with primary narcissism that was never reliably mirrored and so never transformed.

They are categorically separate. In this life-cycle they cooperate. Chivalry keeps the infantile center in place (she need not empty herself into the object). Elevation and tribute invite grandiosity in the heterosexual field (priority, exemption, the other as function). The same arrangement produces vulnerability when the tribute falters: if the world was supposed to remain her mirror, neutrality feels like starvation and “no” feels like attack.

What shows up in many relations is therefore less a locked personality disorder than subclinical state narcissism5—features that swell in the situation that subsidizes them and recede when the situation is withdrawn. That is why the pattern is easiest to see in courtship, marriage theater, and the moral language of “putting her first,” and why it is easy to miss if one only looks for a cartoon tyrant.

4. The life-cycle

Girlhood: the family colludes to spare her a full encounter with the reality principle and with a demanding superego.
Youth: romantic convention meets her with a second compact—society will encourage what remains of the infantile position through culture and institutions.
Adulthood: heterosexual exchange becomes the main stage. He has been trained to relocate his abandoned narcissism into her, to live vicariously through a self-sufficiency he was not allowed to keep. She is trained to receive that relocation as weather. The pedestal he builds is the situation she occupies. That situation feeds the narcissistic amalgam.

The infantile wish is ordinary. The outcome this article describes is not. A subsidized exemption from the reality principle—solipsism, entitlement, collapse when tribute fails—is a maladaptive result, not an ancient or evolutionary norm. What is historically specific is the arrangement that pays for it. Romantic chivalry made that arrangement prevalent by giving it a moral costume: her elevation, his service. Gynocentric culture keeps paying out the contract—her incomplete displacement refunded as charm, his emptying mourned as maturity.

The point is not that women are infants or that men are saints. It is that a culture can assign who remains the baby6 and who must underwrite that remaining—and then call the assignment love.

References:

[1]  Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith Campbell. The narcissism epidemic. Tantor Media, 2009.
[2]  Kofman, Sarah. The Narcissistic Woman: Freud and Girard.  Diacritics, 1980
[3]  Wright, Peter. Romantic Love as a Dyadic Cultural Script. 2026
[4]  Plante, T. G. Mental Disorders of the New Millennium. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. 2006
[5]  Giacomin, M., & Jordan, C. H. State narcissism. In A. D. Hermann, A. B. Brunell, & J. D. Foster (Eds.), Handbook of trait narcissism (pp. 105–111). Springer. 2018
[6]  Wright, P. & Elam, P. Time to throw the baby out with the bathwater. February 13, 2022

Infantile Narcissism Retained: A Structured Checklist for Adult Assessment

/ gynocentrism

Below is a checklist for assessing features of Freud’s primary (“infantile”) narcissism in mature adults.

Primary Narcissism Checklist

The following heuristic checklist can be used for identifying the psychoanalytic features of primary/infantile narcissism as they appear in adult-observable signs. High scores mean the person still organizes experience as if the infantile position were intact.

Rate each item:

0 = rarely / not characteristic
1 = sometimes / situational
2 = frequent / organizing
3 = pervasive / defining

I. Incomplete self–other differentiation

The other is not fully a separate center of experience.

1. Treats other people’s time, body, attention, or resources as naturally available extensions of their own need.
2. Speaks as if their inner state should be obvious without having to communicate it.
3. Experiences another person’s separate agenda as an attack or abandonment rather than ordinary otherness.
4. Has difficulty sustaining curiosity about what the other actually feels, wants, or thinks apart from how it reflects on them.
5. Uses people as functions (soother, audience, supply, mirror) more than as subjects with their own interior.

II. Omnipotence of wish / thought

Reality is expected to conform to inner demand.

6. Assumes wanting something strongly should be enough to make it happen.
7. Treats limits, delays, and “no” as illegitimate rather than as facts.
8. Explains setbacks as someone else’s failure, malice, or incompetence rather than as constraint.
9. Shows magical or quasi-magical certainty (“it will work because I decided it”).
10. Experiences ordinary frustration as catastrophe or insult, not as information.

III. Preserved infantile centrality

The self is still the unmarked center.

11. Expects priority, exemption, or special handling without reciprocal obligation.
12. Experiences being one among many as humiliation.
13. Needs the environment to confirm uniqueness, brilliance, or exceptionality to stay regulated.
14. Parental/caretaking figures (or current substitutes) are still supposed to exist for them, not as people with their own lives.
15. Praise feels like oxygen; neutrality feels like starvation.

IV. Pleasure principle over reality principle (self-domain)

The self is not fully submitted to shared reality.

16. Rules, queues, timing, and mutuality apply to others more than to them.
17. Can intellectualize reality while emotionally refusing it when it wounds self-feeling.
18. Rapidly rewrites events so they remain the injured or exalted party.
19. Accountability lands as persecution.
20. Comfort, stimulation, and restoration of self-feeling outrank the cost to others.

V. Narcissistic object-choice

Love/attachment is organized around the self, not the other’s separate being.

21. Chooses partners/friends who enhance, reflect, or stabilize their self-image.
22. Idealizes intensely, then devalues when the other shows ordinary limitation.
23. Love is contingent on admiration, compliance, or fusion.
24. Empathy appears mainly when the other is useful to self-regulation.
25. Separation is experienced as annihilation or theft, not as loss of a distinct person.

VI. Narcissistic injury and restoration

The old omnipotent bubble bursts, then is patched.

26. Minor slights produce rage, contempt, collapse, or icy withdrawal.
27. Shame is unbearable and is quickly converted into blame, superiority, or disappearance.
28. After injury, must restore the inflated or fused self (triumph, revenge, new supply, grand plan).
29. Cannot stay in the ordinary depressive position: “I am limited and so are they.”
30. Apology, grief, and repair are thin compared with self-restoration.

How to read it

Add the 30 items (range 0–90).

0–25: ordinary adult residues; everyone has some.
26–45: noticeable infantile organization under stress.
46–65: primary-narcissistic position is still a major regulator of relationships and reality-testing.
66–90: the adult still lives much of the time as if the world were an extension of an unweaned self.

Look at clusters, not just the total. A high score in I + II + V is more specific to primary/infantile structure than a high score only in entitlement or grandiosity (those can come from later, secondary narcissism).

Distinctions that matter

Primary / infantile: the other was never fully constituted as other; omnipotence was never fully given up.
Secondary narcissism: object-love was reached, then withdrawn back onto the self after injury.
Ordinary selfishness: choice, not a structural inability to register the other.

*Use the above tool as a grid for patterns across time and relationships, not as a one-sitting quiz.

_______________________________________________

See also: Romantic Chivalry, Gender, and Infantile Narcissism

The Narcissistic Woman: Freud and Girard—by Sarah Kofman (1980)

/ gynocentrism

The following Freudian theory detailed by Sarah Kofman describes men relinquishing infantile narcissism as children, while culture lets women retain it into adulthood, which men then envy and live vicariously through women.

This description seems to capture an inner psychological mechanism that arose and grew more prevalent with the invention of romantic chivalry.


SOURCE: The Narcissistic Woman: Freud and Girard (1980) – by Sarah Kofman

See also:
– Infantile Narcissism Retained: A Structured Checklist for Adult Assessment
– The Narcissistic Life-Cycle of Women in Contemporary Gynocentric Culture (2006)

How The Dowry System Checks Hypergamy

/ Shah Mirza

The following paper by Shah Mirza was first published in July 2026 in New Male Studies Journal.  

Mirza, S. ‘How The Dowry System Checks Hypergamy,’ in New Male Studies An International Journal, ISSN 1839-7816 ~ Vol 14, Issue 1, 2026, Pp. 24–49, 2026 Australian Institute Of Male Health And Studies

Frau Minne as “Goddess”

/ gynocentrism

Several medieval (especially Middle High German) writers explicitly or by clear equivalence refer to the personified figure of love—Frau Minne / vrouwe Minne (Lady Love), or the related Dame Amor / Dame Amour in French traditions—as a goddess (gotinne / Göttin).

Religious scholar Joseph Campbell tells that Dame Amor was also worshipped as a goddess in Germany, quote:

The minnesingers of Germany recognized that this power of amor was indeed divine. It wasn’t simply a secular thing but contained the compulsion of the goddess. The word Minne in German is a reference to this kind of love, and minnesinger means “singer of love.” The greatest of all these poets was Walter von der Vogelweide, a delightful figure whose poetry is simply delicious. Walter speaks of the goddess Minne in her power, in her majesty, and so here you’re on the brink of a religion of love. This religion of love was actually rendered most powerfully, I would say, in the Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg. Gottfried’s poem was left incomplete when he died in 1210. In this story, the potion that Tristan and Iseult drink represents the breakthrough of compulsive love.  [Romance Of The Grail: Magic And Mystery Of Arthurian Legend]

For more on the significance of courtly love/chivalry as a religious practice, see the following:

[1] To ‘Believe’ in Love – The Religious Significance of the Romantic Love Myth in Western Modernity (Sarah Balstrup – 2012)
[2] Courtly Love as Religious Dissent, by Jeffrey B. Russell (1965)

 

5 Reasons Not to Center Your Life Around Romantic Love

/ Vernon Meigs

I had intended for this article to come out close to Valentine’s Day this year. After all, it was originally intended as a rebuttal against Evie Magazine’s article  ‘The Case for Centering Your Life Around Romantic Love‘

I don’t mind talking about the subject of Romantic love months after Valentine’s Day because frankly, the subject need not be limited to that day. We have critiqued the Romantic model for great reason and the relevance of the subject is year-round. I have no qualms about completing these thoughts at this time of year.

While this is not a step-by-step takedown of the article itself, some context is clearly required. If one can see the tag line for the article by Jaimee Marshall, it reads: “That our greatest novels, most enduring works of art, most popular songs, and most affecting films overwhelmingly center around themes of romantic love is telling.”

Amounting to nothing much more than “It’s in our media and recent history, therefore it is right”, it sums up the gist of the article. Okay, if you want more, here are some gimmies.

“We all knew that those who vocally ‘hated’ Valentine’s Day really just meant they hated spending it alone and resented everyone who got to partake in the festivities with a chivalrous, thoughtful lover.”

A hasty summarization alleging that there are no legitimate critiques on the idea of the holiday (Yes, I know it’s not actually a holiday but judging by the pious and worshipful attitudes of its celebrators, is it not practically a “holiday”?) And, the allegation that men are lonely and bitter because they ain’t got no woman. Seems like projection, since these women appear to be constantly bitter at men deciding not to let women be the center of their lives.

And that’s what the title of the article, ‘The Case for Centering Your Life Around Romantic Love’, means in the end, doesn’t it? It reads, ‘The Case for Centering Your Life Around Women’.

The article tries to sound nuanced, as follows:

“Since children are dependent on their parents for survival, some form of sustained pair bonding is clearly essential, though (Richard S.) Schwartz says there’s no reason to think it must be romantic. You could imagine, and indeed there is precedent, for a sort of kin-based, communal structure to raising children that gets the job done without monogamous romantic love. However, romantic love’s persistence across cultures suggests it’s a core feature of human psychology, not an incidental cultural invention.”

I promise this will be the last of the Evie article, but referring to “renowned” biological anthropologist Helen Fisher:

“…one of the world’s leading experts on the neuroscience of romantic love, has described it as humanity’s most powerful drive. ‘People pine for love, they live for love, they kill for love, and they die for love,’ she has said, framing romantic love as a deeply embedded neural system that cannot simply be opted out of. According to Fisher, humans are hardwired for pair bonding through their very brain circuitry.”

Appropriate, is it not, that the emotional impulse to die for and kill for and dedicate one’s life to women comes from an “expert on neuroscience”, presenting male disposability as a norm. And yes, for those new to basic humanity for the male of the human species: the glorification and exaltation of male disposal for the sake of females is precisely what is being talked about here. The Romanticist thinks it’s dreamy. Anyone with basic esteem for men would think it is ghastly.

Since when is love in its most meaningful sense a cause or motive for death and abnegation?

But that’s the gist of that article. Blubbering pontifications confusing romanticism with proper pairbonding between the sexes, elevating Romantic love above all human relations (“All other human relationships pale in comparison”) and the constant appeal to hardwiring and biological inevitability.

In my mind, this all amounts to human (male) self-destruction as an argument for human species survival – this is the essence of collectivism, the denial of humanity to one segment of the species to serve a societal idealism.

Alright, enough of the nonsense. Here are the Five Reasons Not to Center Your Life Around Romantic Love.

1. The History of Romantic Love

The original article implies that our novels, artworks, “popular songs” and “most affecting films” are the proof we need that we need to center our lives around romance. To me, this accidentally suggests that all these are vastly new to human history, and nothing evolutionary in the sense that it was a cornerstone to our becoming homo sapiens, standing on our own two feet and achieving the glory of civilization.

While I am not saying that choices made from human infatuation never happened earlier in human history, nobody called it a virtue per se. The codifying of these infatuations into a whole framework of romantic love, or courtly love, appears to be in the order of centuries old.

Romantic love is as such not a biological constant. Instead it was a new, aristocratic cultural edict in which asymmetrical emotionalism was declared as a virtue. Emotion over mind became the standard. The result was the preaching of man’s sacrifice of rational interests, priorities, personal dignity, discernment, and resources.

What’s more, if we are talking history, marriage was primarily done with economic and political endpoints in mind, and yes as well as kinship. Passion was not the key factor. While to the uninitiated these arrangements seem like a game for the very rich, even the much poorer classes married for economic and survival purposes. The poor in particular did not appear to have the luxury of impulsive romantic acts.

The man grovels for the pedestalized female, who is both superior and more fragile than the man at the same time. Such is the legacy of romantic love, continuing to this day in modern formats. But the modern formats are taken today, erroneously, as evidence of the biological evidence of homo romanticus patiens…the suffering romantic man, as the apex of evolution.  

(Some runner ups were homo troubadorus, and homo pedestalicus, but I digress)

Being the farthest from the historical authority on the subject myself, I will leave some readily accessible links to Peter Wright’s gynocentrism.com, in particular the ones under ‘Courtly & Romantic Love’:

Courtly and romantic love

These will be able to tell you more than I can of the historical details that make clear that Romantic love is far less wholesome than most people delude themselves into thinking. Much of the Romantic ideal is downright misandric, if one can uncover his or her self-imposed blindfolds and take a good look.

2. Romantic Love is for Show and Public Acceptance.

Ever notice how in the process of promoting Romanticism, it always entails an element of loudness and publicity? Romantic love is to be “shouted”, one must want everybody to know it, and it is what the world needs right now to solve all our problems.

In the otherwise genuinely entertaining show Family Matters, Carl Winslow (the husband and father in the show) is too often portrayed as what I can only describe as henpecked, though to be fair this quality did not necessarily dominate the character’s run on the show. In the b-story of the episode “It Didn’t Happen One Night”, Harriette (the wife/mother) is upset with her husband, essentially, because he won’t express how he feels about her in public, and instead prefers to keep things private. This cumulates into what is essentially a concession on Carl’s part as he takes his police megaphone and shouts to the entire neighborhood out his door about how he loves his wife, after which Harriette is happy.

Certainly there are other moments like this in media and no doubt in romantic stories. There are other vestiges of this in our world – the awkward kiss cams in stadiums, carvings in trees with cupid’s arrows, blimps conveying messages that Boy loves Girl (yes, Family Matters did this too), the get-down-on-one-knee and propose in public that I’ve seen too often to my exasperation, and many more.

The marketing used here is “true love against the world”. As if the world will never approve of the love of this fine couple, but they don’t care, they are going to scream it out into the world and it doesn’t matter who knows it!

The problem with that is, that this is false – it’s not about being in defiance of societal expectations. Instead, it is about making sure society approves it.

The Romantic model, certainly as we are seeing it today, is all about advertising one’s love instead of keeping things intimate and private, leaving things within the pairbond and not shoving it into people’s faces. What we have is all about having an audience, and the approval of said audience.

It’s all about making it everybody’s business.

The approval, then, is focused on making sure the female half is “treated right”, when concerning the heterosexual side of things. As a sidenote, romantic framing within the LGBTQ+ contexts are always celebrated and subject to public approval, such to the point that any objection to that is immediately shot down as “bigotry” even if the objection was more akin to “get a room”.

But back on point. This societal scrutiny and approval is what the romantic model thrives on. It has nothing properly to do with indifference or defiance of what others may think.

Let’s talk more on how this is all for the performative benefit for the female. We know that the romantic model enables female narcissism vastly. A key quality about narcissism is the requisite of an audience to adore and uphold the narcissist. This “shout your love” aspect of the social Romantic model is tailor-made for the narcissist.

This is a danger for both healthy pairbonding and to one’s actual character, male or female. The society that abides under the Romantic model is essentially promoting living by consensus.

Under this, men are only “approved humans” if they center their lives around women. The rebuttals for failing to do so are ready-made and women of all stripes are equipped with them: Incel, Misogynist, something referencing penis size, Loser, and whatever else they can scrounge up.

The women in question cannot conceive of a life in which they aren’t showered with social approval, in essence demanding a lifelong princess treatment. Jettisoning self-accountability, she becomes just a set of whims and firing emotions.

And this is supposed to be essential to the human race biologically? This is what we must celebrate?

I’ll close off this second point by mentioning that in a proper pairbond, privacy is non-negotiable to the intimacy. There is nothing wrong with passion (rationally navigated and arrived at), but by its very design it is not something one advertises the particulars of. “None of your business” should be the norm regarding the details of the relationship as far as the passion goes.

The over-advertising and screaming-to-the-world of romance is deluded. If there is a good pair bond, why not keep it personal? Public romance is to involve the world – and so the pair is beholden to that world.

If we as a race evolved to uphold anything, it is our notion of privacy – but that is a subject for another time.

3. Pathologies Particular to the Romantic Model

The big error that Romanticists repeat that make them sound somewhat credible is the conflation of Romantic love with pairbonding itself.

Pairbonding, by the term alone, should imply mutual respect, values-based meaningful love, and above all, a close understanding and a type of friendship. If we look closely at romance, any pretense that it is a valid form of pairbonding has a way of unraveling.

I have already talked about the narcissism it induces particularly in women. The attention-seeking works in two ways: making sure the woman looks well-taken care of and tended to (“treat her right”, etc), and making sure the man us under her thumb and heel as needed, at her beck and call.

The latter sometimes is blatant; he is observably submissive when one takes a quick glance at the relationship. There are other circumstances in which this is not obvious, however: the pretense of leadership. Women, often the tradgyn types, love to talk about how a man leads.

Translating what such a woman says, this reads: “He pulls the carriage I am resting on while I crack the whip.”

Such “leadership” is performative, and she is nothing but condescending towards the very man she is allegedly pairbonded with. But this is neither friendship, understanding, nor any meaningful notion of love.

It resembles a relational pathology.

By design, the male fills the sacrificial role in anything deriving from the Romantic model. In a proper pairbond, a woman should be aghast at the notion that her male partner, her close friend, is to be sacrificed at all; she should be equally aghast that she is the beneficiary and endpoint.

This horror is a rational response, assuming we can expect women to feel this at all at this point. What do we have instead in this world? Adoration, gratitude, and joy – because a man is degraded. She is the visible cause of this, and her response is the opposite of horror. This is the pathology of society, the legacy of Romantic love. And it appears to be essentially exclusive to this model.

I’d be remiss if I failed to mention the accidents of youth that are the result of marketing Romantic love by and large. Emotional damage, radical adjustment to expectations physically and mentally, humiliation, all the way up to teen pregnancy – those are the fruits of Romantic love and the embracing of infatuation as standard instead of a challenge to overcome.

And what about the darker things that have been done? Murders due to jealousy, the murder of children in the light of affairs, suicidal acts of the moment, hybristophilic situations with women romanticizing dangerous criminals, and the most common popular result of romance: the thriving divorce industry and women looting their ex-husbands property without a care in the world.

We can safely say that it is rational to avoid Romantic love. When women, even those who allegedly “defend” men like the busybodies in Evie, instead insist that we need more Romantic love, and assert that only nasty, “lonely and bitter” men are against this, then this only indicates how deep the pathology runs in society. If the antifeminists themselves still fight for gynocentric ideology, it’s more uphill a battle than one wishes it is.

4. Companionate Love is Superior to Romantic Love

I for one wish we had a snappier label for this variant of love that we advocate. Companionate love, for the moment, seems to suffice.

It incorporates Storge in the sense that it is in fact a love of the family in a real sense. A pairbond, assuming it is built to last, is literally chosen family. The reason I don’t care to *only* call it Storge and leave it that is due to the privacy/intimate factor – it specializes it just enough to earn what is possibly a distinct categorization, or a subcategory.

Now let’s talk about Eros, or Erotic love. While Eros is often conflated with Romantic love, this is a mistake, and the reason goes beyond a simple mis-categorization.

Eros, properly, is unabashed. Romantic love, on the other hand, serves to both curtail and subordinate Eros. Romantic love serves to starve and control sex in a way that cartelizes it, to manipulate a man by withholding sex and general affection. So I think it is wrong to directly equate it with Eros.

In case I haven’t made it clearer before, those that hold the reins of Romantic love don’t approve of men’s Eros in any meaningful way. It goes without much explanation that male sexuality is demonized, with the express directive that it is only proper when it serves women. If anything, Romantic love whitewashes Eros, demonizes it and then “forgives” it in men if certain shit-tests are passed.

As the erotic factor is important to a pairbond (albeit in varying degrees; men are different in the volume of their sexuality here), is Erotic love the proper descriptor of what we are looking for?

Well, while it is part of it, a pairbond isn’t necessary per se for erotic love to have some presence, so again it isn’t a complete picture. Like Storge, it isn’t an estimate of it, but it is adjacent. What we are looking for incorporates both to be sure, but it needs a proper category that isn’t Romantic love.

Whatever we call this (and again, Companionate love seems to do for the time being), it is the more rational, moral choice over Romantic love.

So, does this mean we must center our lives around Companionate love instead? The answer…is no.

5. You Shouldn’t Be Centering Your Life Around “Love” Anyway.

Even if Romantic love is all it’s cracked up to be (and I hope I’ve indicated successfully that it isn’t), one must not center one’s life around it. So it should follow that whatever remains that *is* all it’s cracked up to be – that is, what we call Companionate love or any proper form of intimate love – should likewise not be the center of one’s life.

Romantic love is practically by definition centering one’s life around a woman on the man’s part, and on the woman’s part the indulging and moralizing of men’s centering of her in his life. We disavow this paradigm by rejecting Romanticism itself.

So, as a proper form of Companionate love doesn’t involve this centering, it follows we shouldn’t force it to be the center as it is not natural to do so.

A human life essentially is about values and the pursuit of happiness. Things like love are a detail (albeit non-trivial), not an end goal. If anything, the pairbond should be among the number of things that reflect how you live your life with the values you aim for. They are not the aim itself.

Your ikigai, that sense of life purpose and worth, is something particular to yourself that cannot be simplified by who you have a relationship with. Everything and everybody you choose to surround yourself with should be an indicating detail and reflection of the choices you made as per your ikigai. They are not the ikigai itself.

In plainer language, your pairbond should reflect your values, yes. But it is not in itself the center.

While this is the most important reason in this article, there isn’t much to be more longwinded about, and I think this is very straightforward. Love is not the most important thing on this planet nor for our existence, and there are other things more important than the even best iterations of partner love.

Respect, especially for oneself, comes to mind. From that flows mutual respect, the understanding of values and boundaries, and one another. Love being the greatest value in the world tends to comfort people, but it’s time to challenge that.

Some Closing Thoughts on Love

Even if we extracted the toxic elements – the sacrificial expectation for men, the pedestalizing, and the exhibitionistic performances – the very notion that one must center their life around love is a funny thing.

I have come to properly understand love as an action that is self-initiated. In some of its purest forms, it manifests itself as attention that bring out the life in something, be it work on one’s car, a dedicated train set, a well-designed composition or architecture, a meal cooked in just the right way, and many other examples.

Love, then, appears to be a cultivation and a process. It’s not an end goal to center one’s life around, but just something we wield mindfully. It cannot be faked – “duty” or “obligation” to love then becomes inexact, as again this is self-initiated.

The same should stand when love is applied to human relations. Love brings out the life in people where needed. Relationships, and loves, are built over time.

But reliance on another’s love is only an indicator that one has failed to love oneself in a meaningful way as I have described thus far: taking charge of one’s own life and freeing it from being beholden to another’s approval.

The centering of love, and the “pursuit” of it, then makes for two pratfalls: one – the insistence to perform love to the point of sacrificial behavior, and two – the complete, narcissistic reliance on love by another such that they will fall apart when they have to stand alone.

Standing alone is the key to humanity and despite the familiar prattling of how man is a social animal, humanity’s true evolutionary distinction is the ability to stand alone…but that is an article for another time.